A novel about friendship, buried secrets, and the price of uncovering the truth.
Welcome
Every town has stories beneath its streets.
Some are buried beneath abandoned mines.
Others beneath baseball fields, family tables, and memories that refuse to disappear.
Bespoke is where I share those stories.
Featured Book
Seven Hills
A novel by Brent Taylor
Seven towering hills of chat ring the town—waste rock from the mines, pale and glassy in the sun. In 1954, twelve-year-old Grace Ryan arrives and quickly learns that Jasper is not a quiet place, and that danger lingers just beneath its surface.
Drawn by an old survey map, a brass tag marked B6, and questions the adults refuse to answer, Grace, Percy, and Clay uncover hidden tunnels, poisoned water, buried records, and a silence that has protected powerful men for years.
Seven Hills will be Available to purchase October 2026
Stories
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I’ve always loved baseball. Even though it’s a team game, I found solitary ways to embrace it’s poetic rhythms. I was a baseball Walter Mitty, transported to Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I straddled the mound glaring at the batter with annoyed disdain. I emulated Bob Gibson, throwing a rubber baseball against the brick wall…
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It was the first time I ever prayed with my face touching the earth…and the first time I have ever had a prayer interrupted by a President of the United States. I lay prostrate on the green grass surrounding the Washington Monument, praying with ten other men in a tight circle, and a half million…
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I grew up alongside Kevin Arnold of the Wonder Years only without a Jets letter jacket. Those neighborhood landmarks and watershed moments and the guys I ran with, through the streets and adjacent woods just a couple blocks north of Limestone School, are etched in the granite of my adolescent memory. So this section is…
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I love music that changes me, softens the edges, sands down the burrs, raises my hackles. Some songs will forever move me…others not so much. I’ve noticed songs have a useful life with an expiration date just like stock options, yogurt and my hairline. I’m reminded of my coming of age decade, the seventies, when a…
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Do you ever yearn? Some folks yearn to write. Others yearn to paint, or to capture images with a camera, or yearn to connect to a husband or wife or daughter or son…or to God. Yearning embraces a sense that somethings missing, that perfection or wholeness or actualization or some other buzzword of fulfillment is…
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During my final two years at Harding University, I lived in a dilapidated house with eight guys on the edge of campus in Searcy, Arkansas. Rector House stood on North Grand Street and has since been demolished, but in the spring of 1981, it still stood…barely…just months from institutional progress in the form of a…
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Alabama football coach Nick Saban has guided the Crimson Tide to national championships in three of the previous four years. Mr. Saban is famously and professionally attentive to details. Jason Gay recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Coach Saban’s roots as a detail freak. Asked Sunday at a press conference about his father, Big Nick, and…
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When I slip into a neurotic moment (pretty common for me) while wandering about bookstores, I read the first line of a book and then skip to the final page and read the last line. I love the first and last lines of great books because they frame the body of work like neon parentheses. Here are some…
Bespoke 